Lifting the Lid on Trump

Author and staff writer at The New Yorker, Mark Singer, considers the reality of national life and death under President TrumpIllustration – Louise Pomeroy

To try to understand how and why one of America’s two major political parties managed to nominate a presidential candidate so self-absorbed, defiantly ignorant, intellectually vapid, impulsively combative, compulsively mendacious and recklessly erratic as to jeopardise the United States’ strategic international alliances, national security and standing as a rational guardian of the world order, begin with the inanity of our electoral protocols. Our national anthem brightly declares us “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Politically, though, we are the land of the easily amused and the home of the readily fooled.

The 2016 campaign got underway the afternoon of January 20, 2013. Earlier that day, President Barack Obama had taken the oath of office marking the inauguration of his second – and final – term. Officially, this meant four more years to command the armed forces, steer the world’s largest national economy through its recovery from the most dire crisis since the Great Depression, and fulfil the duties and responsibilities designated by the Constitution. The Republican Party leadership, however, was having none of it. Throughout Obama’s first term, the opposition had embraced a content-free agenda of resolute obstructionism, a strategy still in effect. Obama would be the lamest of lame ducks. Other than the ceremonial formalities, they vowed, his presidency was kaput. In this regard, they were enabled by a political punditocracy that had already turned its attention to the next election. Focus conscientiously upon the arduous work of governance? For the possibility of transcending partisan differences for the common good? For the redress of stark social and economic inequalities? Please! Only the horse race, it seemed, mattered.

When, in June 2015, Donald Trump formally declared his candidacy, he had already spent four decades clamouring for public attention. New Yorkers knew him as a rough-edged rich kid from the outer boroughs – son of a developer who amassed a fortune building rental housing in middle-class Queens – who had crossed the river into Manhattan and ingeniously succeeded, as no one previously had dared, at branding real estate. Depending upon one’s perspective, Donald was either a self-parodying parvenu or an aspirational figure. He developed residential high-rises plastered with the ‘TRUMP’ moniker, then diversified in Atlantic City, where he built casino hotels slathered with blinding ornamentation, the goal being to titillate suckers with the fantasy that a Trump-like life was a lifelike life – to distract from the fact that he had lured them inside to pick their pockets. The odds favouring the house notwithstanding, the casinos would in time fail, a saga of serial bankruptcies (six!) that would correlate with Trump’s nastiest habits, his cruel pleasure in stiffing creditors and his hair-trigger litigiousness.

His personal life was no tidier. During the first of his three marriages, he had committed blatant adultery (along the way snookering the New York Post, a tabloid, into publishing a headline with a putative quote from his mistress and future second-ex-wife: “BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD”). Equally promiscuous had been the bankers credulous enough to lend Trump billions. No longer creditworthy, he possessed only one remaining exploitable resource – his brand. Going forward, moneyed partners would assume all the risks and, in exchange for having his name on their buildings, Trump would earn back-end equity when a project succeeded. Such details were hidden from a public for whom the Trump illusion survived. For more than a decade preceding his candidacy, Trump’s day job had been reality television star. No longer – and perhaps not ever – an actual billionaire, he now impersonated one on TV. Trump’s role on ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ constituted his political capital, an asset he would leverage to seduce millions of voters suspended in their own collective fog of make-believe.

America’s first-ever reality TV presidential campaign began infamously, of course, with Trump’s slander of Mexicans as rapists and drug smugglers. Islamophobia followed. The bigotry extended his four-year run as the nation’s birther-in-chief, promoter of the racist lie that Obama had been born not in Hawaii but in Kenya, rendering his presidency illegitimate. Birtherism – stirred with economic populism, fear and nativism – begat Trumpism, a brew concocted by a narcissist, drunk on his metamorphosis into demagogue.

Eventually, 16 other horses joined the race, among them senators, governors, former senators and governors, one in-way-over-his-head retired neurosurgeon, and one erstwhile corporate chief executive. The latter two, in particular, hoped to trade upon their outsider status with an electorate disgusted by the political status quo and especially by Washington. Any of the contenders seemed as likely to prevail as Trump, whose candidacy for far too long was treated by the press, the public and the Republican establishment as a relatively harmless novelty. Trump win the nomination? Get outa here. The general election? – beyond ludicrous.

By the time the first primary votes were cast, in early February, his candidacy was seven-and-a-half months old. The monster had long since risen from the laboratory table and run amok. There had been 13 debates and ‘candidate forums’, and Trump had dominated virtually all of them – bullying, interrupting, taunting and lying about his opponents. One by one, short of votes, short of money, they gave up. Each retreat seemed inevitable and each seemed to embolden him. When challenged, he attacked the moderators. During campaign rallies, he incited his supporters to spew venom at the hapless journalists assigned to cover him.

With laudable exceptions – Politifact.com (a project of the Tampa Bay Times), Fact Checker (ditto, Washington Post), Factcheck.org (Annenberg Public Policy Center) – not until Trump had clinched the nomination did most news organisations subject him to the scrutiny they could have and should have from the get-go.

By the time of the first debate (of three) with Hillary Clinton, the election was six weeks away and the race was perilously close. Arrogant as ever, Trump showed up unprepared. Clinton did decidedly the opposite. Not long into the proceedings, Trump was reduced to petulant defensiveness. At the end, both his feet were perforated with multiple bullet holes – a historically awful performance.

How awful? One of his most pugnacious partisans, Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, showed up in the spin room to cry foul. The debate moderator, an equable, self-restrained network anchorman, had had the temerity to correct one of Trump’s more flagrant lies by citing widely documented data. “If I were Donald Trump,” Giuliani said, “I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact-checker.” Goddam facts!

Twenty years ago, while preparing a profile of Trump for the New Yorker, I spent a great deal of time with him across several months. Early on, I decided not to take personally the transparent distortions that constantly burbled from his lips – or, if you will, his reflexive lying – telling myself, ‘That’s just the way the man talks.’ Trump said many things that I found baffling, such as when he described the apartments he sold as belonging to three categories: “luxury, super luxury and super-super luxury.” This taxonomy led to my conclusion that he “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

Naturally, Trump hated what I wrote and my reward was his undying enmity. But I knew that my verdict was accurate, evidence of which the electorate has now been exposed to for more than a year. Still, I am resisting presumptuous optimism. This is a matter of national life or death. Trump, soulless or not, might yet be the next occupant of the White House. Should that come to pass, dear Lord, please save ours.

Mark Singer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974. He is also the author of Trump & Me, published by Penguin Books.